With that, the season has come full circle. The Edmonton Oilers posted their second-best ten-game segment of the year, mimicking that magical opening month with outstanding goal prevention and some timely, if not exactly abundant, scoring.

An important aspect to this odd reset from October to April is the official changing of the guard in the Oilers crease. While October was Nikolai Khabibulin’s time to shine brightly with a final blaze of glory, the veteran backstop now watches most games from the bench as Devan Dubnyk runs the show and quite frequently steals it.

After posting a shutout in Game 70 to close out the previous segment, DD deftly dominated throughout much of the current one, posting a 5-2-1 record with superb 1.97 goals-against average and .938 save percentage in his eight starts. Khabibulin meanwhile posted pedestrian figures of 0-1-1, 2.88, and .887 respectively.

Story continues below

This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below.

These stark differences in performance are reflected in the player game grades my colleague Jonathan Willis and I have been faithfully recording here at the Cult of Hockey throughout the season. Dubnyk’s average grade of 7.3 in the eighth segment is the best of the season for any Oiler other than the 7.7 Khabibulin averaged in that torrid opening stretch.

On the blueline one constant has been the performance of Ladi Smid, at least until Dustin Brown knocked him out of the line-up. Smid continued to take on the tough assignments while scoring the only two goals from the blueline in the segment (2-2-4, +3). Jeff Petry (0-6-6, -2) and Ryan Whitney (0-5-5, +4) contributed some playmaking from the blueline, while the rest of the group was quiet.

Story continues below

This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below.

Up front Taylor Hall was lost for the season in the first shift of the segment. In his absence the other two “young gunz” led the way offensively, as Jordan Eberle posted boxcars of 3-6-9, +1 and Ryan Nugent-Hopkins 2-6-8, +3, while being the only Oilers to grade 5 or higher in all ten games. (Dubnyk and Smid did so in 8 out of 8 games.) Another youngster, Teemu Hartikainen, posted a team leading +7 to complement two goals and five points, while veteran Ales Hemsky led the team with five goals including an impressive hat trick in Nashville.

To summarize, here are the average player grades for the final ten-game segment, with our customary remark about each player’s performance specifically during the period:

* * *

Cult of Hockey graders (eighth segment):

Jonathan Willis – 6 games Bruce McCurdy – 4 games A spreadsheet of game-by-game player game grades season-to-date is here.

This is the last of our segment reviews, but we’ll return for a final look at grades over the season-in-full sometime around Garbage Bag Day.